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Month: July 2010

I am finally on the mend. Throat still swollen, jaw still achy, but I can actually DO things again. What am I doing? Why, moving to Chicago with the Significant Other in a vanishingly small amount of time. Thirteen days to do what should have been spread out over a month. The SO’s mum is gifting us with some gorgeous antique furnishings that have been gathering spiderwebs in her garage for a year. We spent most of the weekend cleaning and polishing, but there’s still plenty to be done there. Need to repack some boxes (kitchen stuff; dishes and glassware mostly), figure out a safe way to pack up a mirror, clean up a free office chair my boss gave me, beat some giant rugs to death, pick up my poor broken computer from the shop…the list is endless. And I’m trying to finish a book for work before I leave; I already have over forty hours this week. Plus the SO has a million going-away shindigs, and the family would like to see me before I fly away, and we’re still house-sitting until Monday, which has been lovely but I’m ready to not make the drive out to that side of town anymore. Is insanity.

Also, I am not drinking again, because my immune system needs all the help it can get. It’ll be two weeks this Friday with no booze…AND no caffeine. I don’t even recognize myself.

Soon it will all be over. And then the semester will start, and I’ll be right back in the hamster wheel. None of this is by way of complaint. I’m shockingly happy. Spending too much of the summer down sick makes me appreciate the simple fact that I’m well enough to keep doing things.

Yes, that’s right. The one perk of wisdom-teeth extraction, real, honest-to-betsy narcotic pain relievers, and I can’t take them. I managed for the first day and half, and damn did the Vicodin help with the pain, but my stomach roiled the whole way. Then, late Saturday evening, my system gave up. Vomiting with mouth stitches? Least favorite thing ever.

So now I am off Vicodin and on Tylenol and Advil alternating, both of which should read “Why Bother” on the label. Stupid stomach.

Soon I will tell you in detail about my kidney stones. I BET YOU CAN’T WAIT.

So many awesome, ambitious plans for the summer, derailed by my mouth. I keep trying to write, but the best I’ve been able to manage is reading. I’m working a billion more hours than I’d hoped to pay for the mouth. I’m in pretty much constant pain, even after the root canal. Wisdom tooth extraction scheduled for this week, but I can’t get the crown put on until I go back to Chicago–the wisdom teeth are in the way of the crown, and it takes a month for the crown to be made before they can place it. So it’s going to be another two months of this, with dental work overlapping the first weeks of school. I’m so frustrated and angry I keep bursting into tears. Thousands of dollars and so. Much. Time. My insurance only covers a few doctors in the entire state of AZ (at least I’m sort’ve covered; I shouldn’t complain…I could be uninsured), so best of all, I get to drive an hour and a half each way to my extraction appointment. And Rhin’s in town, and this was supposed to be our writing vacation for the novel, and now? Now she’s driving me to the oral surgeon, because that’s what friends do, apparently. I feel lame, and broke, and pretty well beaten down. Nevermind that school starts in three weeks, and I somehow need to finish a book (the impossible Giza) and a magazine for my editing job before I leave town. And revise my syllabus for composition. And read for the lit class I’m TAing. And my boyfriend is moving with me, and I was all set up to have money and emotional support saved up so I could be of some help to him, and…yeah. Life got in the way.

This summer, I had a tooth filled. The long story involves my childhood dentist versus my new dentist (the one covered by my insurance), an allergic reaction causing my face to swell up, new dentist threatening to pull my tooth entirely (“a wisdom tooth might grow in; you could get lucky”), and over a month now of serious nerve pain. I’m having dreams of pulling out all my teeth, then leaping around joyfully as a gummy twenty-something. My mouth aches so badly.

It also feels like a social class slide, moving from los padres’ decent insurance to my own (worse) AZ insurance, and now on to the (epically bad) limited insurance my current university provides. I’m grateful to have anything at this point, but I do wish I could afford real health care, something better than the dental equivalent of a dude with a rusty pair of pliers. It’s looking like, after already spending a small fortune on the original filling, even under insurance, I’m going to need to go back and spend a much larger fortune digging out the filling and replacing it with a root canal so that the exposed nerve ending giving me hell with STFU. And, insult to injury, I’ll probably end up at the same awful dentist who effed up the tooth in the first place.